Pocket Spacecraft
Now anyone with $300 can send their own personal spacecraft (called Scouts) to the moon. If you want to keep things closer to home, a $150 pledge gets you an Earth Scout that will be released into Earth's atmosphere.
Your Scout is a polyimide disc (a material used for flexible circuit boards, spacesuits and, of particular relevance for this application, high performance solar sails) held taut by a NiTi memory metal hoop that can also double as an antenna. These will be loaded by the thousand into an Interplanetary CubeSat Mothership which will fly to the body of interest, send out the Scouts to explore it, and relay their discoveries back to Earth and amongst each other.
The thinness and lightness allows the packing of thousands per mothership and act as very small solar sails (when coated with a thin metal layer) to move about space, and potentially survive re-entry from orbit to the surface of bodies with suitable atmospheres.
Now anyone with $300 can send their own personal spacecraft (called Scouts) to the moon. If you want to keep things closer to home, a $150 pledge gets you an Earth Scout that will be released into Earth's atmosphere.
Your Scout is a polyimide disc (a material used for flexible circuit boards, spacesuits and, of particular relevance for this application, high performance solar sails) held taut by a NiTi memory metal hoop that can also double as an antenna. These will be loaded by the thousand into an Interplanetary CubeSat Mothership which will fly to the body of interest, send out the Scouts to explore it, and relay their discoveries back to Earth and amongst each other.
The thinness and lightness allows the packing of thousands per mothership and act as very small solar sails (when coated with a thin metal layer) to move about space, and potentially survive re-entry from orbit to the surface of bodies with suitable atmospheres.
You can upload a picture or message which will be printed on your spacecraft. You decide where you would like your Scout to go – load it onto the Earth Scout deck, and soon after it is launched into space, we’ll release it into Earth’s atmosphere to attempt re-entry and recovery from the surface of the planet. Load it onto the Lunar Scout deck and we’ll try to send it to the moon and release it to deorbit to the surface of the moon.
Scouts are solar powered with integrated optical and radio transceivers and can have sensors including a single pixel optical sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor, strain gauges and more. If you are comfortable with Arduino level software development, you can run your own software on Software and Hardware Development Scouts. We’ll provide a web based integrated development environment (IDE) so you can write code, test on a Scout simulator and in a virtual solar system and upload your design to your own Software Development Scout.
Scouts are solar powered with integrated optical and radio transceivers and can have sensors including a single pixel optical sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature sensor, strain gauges and more. If you are comfortable with Arduino level software development, you can run your own software on Software and Hardware Development Scouts. We’ll provide a web based integrated development environment (IDE) so you can write code, test on a Scout simulator and in a virtual solar system and upload your design to your own Software Development Scout.
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